Tag Archives: Computerworld Mobile & Wireless

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Airlines succeed when they can treat passengers with a personal touch and top-notch customer service. For example, flight attendants can call passengers by name, provide personalized meals (that are, say, vegetarian or kosher), give extra attention to nervous fliers, provide added service for loyalty-card members or keep an eye on passengers with a history of disruptiveness.

While there remain some industry observers that cling to rapidly diminishing arguments against such deployment, “Apple devices are already pervasive in the enterprise,” Mahmoud Naghshineh, General Manager, Offerings and Solutions, IBM, told me.

Last week, Apple made it clear that it intends for iOS to remain the dominant mobile platform for the enterprise. iOS 11, which will be released as a public beta later this month and is due out in final form this fall, doubles down on productivity, offers a more intuitive UI, and ensures that the iPad Pro can actually replace a PC for the vast majority of worker tasks.

The most notable iOS 11 features for business use are, not surprisingly tied to the iPad Pro, which in the past has been useful for certain tasks — especially for designers and for word processing — but often didn’t meet the bar to serve as a true PC alternative.

The biggest issue with the iPad has always stemmed from its inception as a mobile device. When Apple’s tablet arrived seven years ago, there was a lot of dismissive talk that it was really nothing more than a larger iPhone or iPod Touch. It didn’t help that Apple initially positioned the iPad as a consumer device, one for viewing content rather than creating it. Despite Apple’s efforts to make iOS devices true enterprise citizens — and it’s had a fair amount of success doing so — the belief persists that the iPad isn’t a PC (or Mac) and therefore is a secondary device rather than a primary computing solution.

Mobile first set Apple’s direction

Within that debate, there’s a nugget of truth. iOS is, and always has been, a mobile OS. It was originally designed for a phone, where the capabilities needed for business are rather different. We don’t expect to do 3D modeling or write long documents or presentations on a phone, despite its processing power and today’s larger form factors. Apple also made an effort to ensure continuity of user experience across all iOS devices, which includes devices with displays ranging from four inches to almost 13.

Apple has been largely successful in doing that. But trying to keep a single user experience across those form factors and use cases had the effect of hobbling how users, particularly business users, could be productive on the iPad. iOS 11 breaks that tradition by delivering a much more capable, even somewhat desktop-like, user interface on the iPad compared to the iPhone. From what we’ve seen so far, Apple managed this without truly disrupting the relation between the iPad and iPhone.

Apple’s decision to deliver a more unique experience on the iPad this year also had a side effect. Many of the newly unveiled interface elements in iOS 11 on the iPad take design cues from macOS. Drag and drop, the on-screen Dock, the Files app, the ability to have multiple paired apps and slide between them, all are strongly reminiscent of their desktop counterparts.

In making the iPad more capable, it’s becoming more Mac-like. If you put Apple’s product lines side by side, there is now a very effective and obvious progression of user interface from desktop to tablet to phone to watch. This gives all of Apple’s products a greater sense of cohesion. And it strengthens Apple’s ecosystem because one device leads so naturally to the next. That’s even clearer when you consider services like the Continuity features Apple released two years ago, or even the ease of setup for products like the Apple Watch and AirPods.

I get it: There’s something satisfying about being able to quantify a concept — to define it in numerical terms that tell us unequivocally what it’s all about.

The problem is that in many cases, numbers don’t actually tell the whole story. Sometimes, in fact, they can even cloud what’s really important.

We see this sort of thing happen in tech all the time. For years, everyone loved to focus on a phone’s specs — how many pixels its screen contained, what level of processor it relied on for its computing power, and so on. But then we reached a point where, for most practical purposes, all of that stuff kinda became irrelevant. Pretty much every modern mobile device from midrange on up is fast. All the displays look stunning. The numbers alone just don’t mean much anymore; what matters most is the real-world user experience — something that can’t be quantified.

A report today once again confirms Apple is interested in making your iPhone the center of your electronic health records (EHR) data. What’s going on, and why does this matter?

Take a Gliimpse

Apple last year acquired Gliimpse, an electronic health records development company. When news of the purchase broke, I suggested this marked the company’s interest in developing its own EHR systems, and this has been confirmed by CNBC.

Researchers have created a device using off-the-shelf components that can sniff out controversial cell phone surveillance devices, known as IMSI-catchers or StingRays, used by federal and state law enforcement as well as hackers.

The International Mobile Subscriber Identity-catchers have not only been used to locate mobile devices but also to sometimes eavesdrop on users, send spam or upload malware, according to University of Washington (UW) security researchers.

“The threats remain the same when looking at enterprises: tracking and, under certain circumstances, eavesdropping are possible through this attack,” said Dionisio Zumerle, a Gartner research director for Mobile Security. “The attack requires technical expertise and equipment that was once hard to find; today it is easier and that is the main source of concern.”

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I started using a Mac for the first time at a corporate job in the 1990s.

I still remember starting up Photoshop for the first time and being amazed at how much editing I could do on a color photo, and then doing some basic page layout in a long-forgotten app called Aldus PageMaker.

These were the days when there was still a sense of wonder about being able to load multiple apps at once, and even the classic mouse was still fairly new, at least in terms of doing professional graphic design work with some accuracy.

Recently, Apple announced they would be adding a few features to the iPad that, when I first heard about them, instantly wondered if this was going to be the end of the Mac for good. I know, processing power on mobile devices is still not quite there yet. You can’t quite fit a high-end NVIDIA card into an iPad. Yet, from a workflow standpoint, several features in iOS 11 stand out as noteworthy, but they are also a sign that the Mac might be heading for extinction.